Bat House Kit

Every evening, like clockwork, the moment that the sun sets over the horizon and the sky is streaked with deep pinks, oranges, and the start of the navy blue night, dozens of bats start swooping and diving in the tree-tops outside of our apartment windows.

They come from hidden corners in the eaves of buildings, and increasingly, from the Bat Houses installed on more and more of our neighborhood's apartment buildings. Nature's best mosquito repellent, brown bats eat hundreds of mosquitoes and mosquito-sized insects an hour, and their dwindling population can mean a population explosion in the insect world. Since we are not comfortable using insect repellent on kids, we are embracing a more natural method of insecticide!

Below is a bat house, fully loaded! The Bat Conservation gives helpful hints about where to place your bat house, for maximum effect.

After having accidentally had a few bats swoop through our windows and do laps around the dining room table for a few days, we suggest also keeping the bat house away from large, open windows!

We won't lie - these aren't particularly adorable creatures - but they are beautiful to watch fly, and more importantly, we almost never see mosquitos in the neighborhood, and can't remember the last mosquito bite we had, and that makes the bat houses well worth it! We would much rather have bats than be covering the kids in insect repellent.